SOMEHOW IT had all seemed a bit far-fetched that one underwhelming performance in a pre-tournament friendly was going to have Giovanni Trapattoni pressing what would, by his standards, be the panic button.

Sure enough, after his players had trained for the first time on Polish soil yesterday, the Italian confirmed that, far from changing his team or tactics between now and next Sunday, he is simply going to persuade his players to do what they are doing a little bit better than before. Those unwilling to pull their weight, he suggested, may get to acquaint themselves with the bench.

His focus yesterday (after a training session which John O’Shea, Shay Given and Glenn Whelan were allowed to sit out despite being fine, he said) was primarily on the team’s strikers and their role in providing defensive cover when required to in midfield, where the Republic of Ireland were overrun on Monday night in Budapest.

During a heated press conference after Monday night’s match the manager gave the impression he was thinking of tinkering with the starting line-up for the Croatia game he had announced only the previous evening or even, more dramatically, reshaping his team so as to introduce a fifth midfielder.

He returned yesterday with a mission to explain and he summed it up succinctly when he observed: “Yes, we could have an extra player in midfield but we don’t need to if the strikers do their work.”

Trapattoni is not one for publicly apportioning blame and so no names were mentioned but it was clear he feels his frontmen in Monday’s draw failed to pull their weight. The game, he said after rewatching it, had not been as bad from an Irish perspective as he had thought, but clearly the five-man midfield deployed by the Hungarians had caused his men more trouble than it should have.

“I watched many games of the Irish team before I came here and when I got here I talked to one of my players about something I had seen,” he said by way of providing historical context for the current situation.

“You got ball and attacked but then you lost it and your opponent went, crossed the ball and they scored. Where were you? You stayed up front without the ball and the others scored a goal like you were like Pontius Pilate. If that player had gone back and hadn’t allowed him to make the cross then it wouldn’t have been a goal.”

This, he explained is essentially the problem with the Irish team as they prepare for a tournament in which the team’s midfield may well find itself in need of as much help as it can get.

He cannot, he said, drop a striker because Ireland can not pose enough of an attacking threat with only one and so at least the two he plays must always be willing to track back and defend when they have to.

“It’s clear,” he said, “there is only one ball and when you need to attack then everybody has to attack and when you defend everyone has to defend. If you need to be here and not there then you need to be here not there because,” he explained, “the opponents are coming and if you stay where you are then they might score.”

Not for the first time, the Italian bemoaned the lack of time he gets on the training ground to convey what he wants of the players but he said here he will be speaking to his players both individually and collectively and trying to get the message across. That speaking will not be on the training ground today, however, as today’s session has been cancelled perhaps in response to suggestions from Keith Andrews and Aiden McGeady that players were feeling the effects of two weeks of hard training in the match against Hungary.

“I said it three days ago (what the team will be) and I still have the same opinion. I know the problem with his line-up (that it gets swamped in midfield when outnumbered) but I will talk to them, I will tell then that this sacrifice (the work involved), is important. If they have a doubt about the sacrifice,” he warned, “then I can change things.”